Deeplinks Blog posts about Video Games

Wolfire Games is running an innovative pay-what-you-want promotion for five great indie video games with some proceeds benefiting EFF! Normally the five games would be valued at $80, but from now until Tuesday, 5/11, you can pay what you want for the entire game bundle including:

Kudos to Linden Lab, which has just released an update to the Terms of Service for their virtual world, Second Life, that includes language that will protect fair use of screenshots and machinima. The new Snapshot and Machinima Content License grants Linden Lab and other users of Second Life a license to use “in snapshots and machinima your Content that is displayed in-World in publicly accessible areas of the Service.”

If the messages in EFF's inbox today are anything to go by, a lot of people are upset and angry — with good reason — over Sony's announcement that it is going to disable a feature that allows people to run GNU/Linux and other operating systems on their PlayStation 3 consoles.

"Your console has been banned." For many gaming enthusiasts, perhaps nothing is more unnerving than the prospect of losing the ability to duel with friends and strangers over the Internet for hours on end. Yet earlier this month, this fear became a reality for many Xbox owners when Microsoft banned a large number of consoles from its Xbox Live service. The move effectively prevents the machines from playing games online, and according to reportssofar, the ban allegedly only affects consoles that have been modified by users in order to play pirated games.

When you buy World of Warcraft (WoW) in a retail box, do you own the copy of the software you bought? That's the critical legal question facing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a pending appeal in MDY v. Blizzard, and the question that Public Knowledge took on in an excellent amicus brief filed with the court earlier this week.